This sponsored report from MIT Technology Review, produced in partnership with Neo4j, examines why enterprise AI agents frequently fail to move from pilot to production — with only about 34% of agentic AI projects reaching production on average. The core problem identified is not a lack of data, but a lack of knowledge: the contextual understanding of what data means within an organization. Without this, agents make flawed and unreliable decisions. The report, based on a survey of 300 technology executives, finds that legacy data systems, security concerns, and data fragmentation (cited by 55% of respondents) are the primary obstacles.

A small group of "production leaders" — organizations where 61% of agentic projects advance beyond pilot — demonstrate notably stronger knowledge capabilities, particularly in semantics. To close the gap, executives expect the biggest impact to come from strengthening the structural foundation between organizational data and AI agents through a dedicated knowledge layer. Investment priorities include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), ingestion pipelines, AI-ready APIs, AI evaluation agents, and knowledge graphs to expand agent access to contextual knowledge.